Stereo amplifier or AV receiver?

dwjoll · 13 Feb 2016 at 16:53

Hi folks

I'm looking for something to accompany new my set up that I'm about to purchase (Samsung H6400 TV and Q Acoustics 3010 speakers).

What I'm confused about though is whether to go with an AV Receiver or a Stereo/Hifi mini system. There's two products I'm interested in so far:

Pioneer VSXS510 Slim Line 3D Ready Home Cinema Receiver
£309

Or

[URL="http://www.richersounds.com/product/mini-hi-fi/marantz/mcr610-melody-media/mara-mcr610-blk]MARANTZ MCR610 MELODY MEDIA[/URL]
£299

Is there really any point getting an AV receiver when I'm only using two bookshelf speakers, plus the TV will have enough HDMI inputs for my other devices (NowTV box and Xbox) Seems like a lot of wasted connectivity or am I wrong?

I like the idea of having AirPlay because I can stream my music from my Mac. The CD player on the Marantz is a bonus because I have a big CD collection.

I need something relatively slim so it fits into my tv stands shelves.

Thanks as always for any advice.

vanandjuanunited · 13 Feb 2016 at 17:09

Avr will have all sources connected to it so would simplify things plus you get sound over hdmi through your speakers.
Do you have plans to go for surround sound?

dwjoll · 13 Feb 2016 at 17:23

vanandjuanunited said:
Avr will have all sources connected to it so would simplify things plus you get sound over hdmi through your speakers.
Do you have plans to go for surround sound?

No will be sticking with 2.0. Don't really have an appropriate room for surround or 5.1.

Can you explain what you mean by it simplifys things? Is it a usability thing?

What I'm not getting is the pros and cons of connecting my HDMI sources to the AVR, as opposed to all the HDMI sources into the TV and then just optical out to the amp.

lucid · 13 Feb 2016 at 18:26

With a good quality simple stereo source signal the Marantz 610 should win hands down. If you have no plans to ever go 5.1 then a stereo amp (or Hi-Fi all-in-one such as the 610 is) with Optical in and routing the sound via the TV will be perfectly fine. The vast majority of TVs down-convert any multichannel source connected via HDMI to basic stereo anyway, so you're not losing anything. If you were coming at this from the 5.1 angle and wanted to preserve any multichannel signals in their native format then that's when having an AV Receiver and connecting the sources to it first makes most sense. That's not the situation in your case though.

On a side note, if we are talking about sound quality then sound via HDMI isn't any better than analogue or optical or digital coax etc. Depending on the source it may actually be worse. For example, basic Blu-ray players can play CDs, but they are not good CD players.

dwjoll · 14 Feb 2016 at 14:34

lucid said:
With a good quality simple stereo source signal the Marantz 610 should win hands down. If you have no plans to ever go 5.1 then a stereo amp (or Hi-Fi all-in-one such as the 610 is) with Optical in and routing the sound via the TV will be perfectly fine. The vast majority of TVs down-convert any multichannel source connected via HDMI to basic stereo anyway, so you're not losing anything. If you were coming at this from the 5.1 angle and wanted to preserve any multichannel signals in their native format then that's when having an AV Receiver and connecting the sources to it first makes most sense. That's not the situation in your case though.

On a side note, if we are talking about sound quality then sound via HDMI isn't any better than analogue or optical or digital coax etc. Depending on the source it may actually be worse. For example, basic Blu-ray players can play CDs, but they are not good CD players.

Thanks for the info lucid - that's helped a lot.